In the nineteenth-century South, there existed numerous local
pockets where cultures and values different from those of the
dominant planter class prevailed. One such area was the Florida
parishes of southeastern Louisiana, where peculiar conditions
combined to create an enclave of white yeomen. In the years after
the Civil War, levels of violence among these men escalated to
create a state of chronic anarchy, producing an enduring legacy of
bitterness and suspicion. In Samuel C. Hyde's careful and original
study of a society that degenerated into utter chaos, he
illuminates the factors that allowed these conditions to arise and
triumph.
Early in the century, the Florida parishes were characterized by
an exceptional level of social and political turmoil. Stability
emerged as the cotton economy expanded into the piney-woods
parishes during the 1820s and 1830s, bringing with it slaves and
prosperity -- but also bringing increasing dominance of the region
by a powerful planter elite that shaped state government to suit
its purposes.
By the early 1840s, Jacksonian political rhetoric inspired a
newfound assertiveness among the common folk. With the construction
of a railroad through the piney-woods region at the close of the
antebellum period and the collapse of the planter class at the end
of the Civil War, the plain folk were finally able to reject the
planters' authority. Traditional patterns of political and economic
stability were permanently disrupted, and the residents -- their
Jeffersonian traditions now corrupted by the brutal war and
Reconstruction periods -- rejected all governance and resorted
increasingly to violence as the primary solution to conflict. For
the remainder of the nineteenth century, the Florida Parishes had
some of the highest murder rates in the country.
In Pistols and Politics, Hyde gives serious scrutiny to a region
heretofore largely neglected by historians, integrating the
anomalies of one area of Louisiana into the history of the state
and the wider South. He reassesses the prevailing myth of poverty
in the piney woods, portrays the conscious methods of the ruling
planter elite to manipulate the common people, and demonstrates the
destructive possibilities inherent in the area's political
traditions as well as the complex mores, values, and dynamics of a
society that produced some of the fiercest and most enduring feuds
in American history.
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